f the Yeomen brings back a good yarn that is going round the camps
at their expense. They are notorious for two things--their pluck and their
awful bad bushcraft. They would ride up to the mouth of a foeman's guns
coolly and gamely enough, but they can't find their way home on the veldt
after dark to save their souls, and so fall into Boer traps with a
regularity that is becoming monotonous. Recently a British officer who had
business in a Boer laager asked a commander why they set the Yeomen free
when they made them prisoners. "Oh!" quoth the Boer, with a merry twinkle
in his eye, "those poor Yeomen of yours, we can always capture them when we
want them." This is not a good story to tell if you want an _encore_,
if you happen to be sitting round a Yeoman table or camp fire.

But it is time I got back to the subject which lay in my mind when I sat
down to write this epistle. The lieutenant's war dance took me off the
track for a while, but I thought his story would come in nicely under the
heading of "Hunting and Hunted." Camp life gets dull at times, so does camp
food, the eternal round of fried flour cakes and mutton makes a man long
for something which will remind him that he has still a palate, so when one
of the scouts came in and told me that he had seen three herds of
vildebeestes, numbering over a hundred each, and dozens of little mobs of
springbok and blesbok, within ten miles of camp, away towards Doornberg, I
made up my mind to ride out next day, and have a shot for luck. My friend
Driscoll, captain of the Scouts, rammed a lot of sage advice into me
concerning Boers known to be in force at Doornberg. I assured him that I
had no intention of allowing myself to drift within range of any of the
veldtsmen, so taking a sporting Martini I mounted my horse and set forth,
intending to have a real good time among the "buck." At a Kaffir kraal I
picked up a half-caste "boy," who assured me that he knew just where to
pick up the "spoor" of the vildebeeste, and he was as good as his boast,
for within a couple of hours he brought me within sight of a mob of about
fifty of the animals, calmly grazing. I worked my way towards them as well
as I could, leaving the "boy" to hold my horse; but, though I was careful
according to my lights, I was not sufficiently good as a veldtsman to get
within shooting distance before they saw me or scented me. Suddenly I saw a
fine-looking fellow, about as big as a year-and-a-half-old steer, tr